Air warfare of World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Air warfare of World War II did not begin with Pearl Harbor or the Battle of Britain. In a way, it began with a phrase. Italian theorist Giulio Douhet, writing in the 1920s, captured the faith of a generation of airmen in four words: "the bomber will always get through." That conviction shaped the doctrine of every major power entering the war, and it would be tested, revised, and sometimes shattered over six years of fighting across every ocean and continent.

  By the time the conflict ended, air power had become the central axis around which armies, navies, and economies rotated. Nations poured staggering portions of their industrial output into it. The Soviet Union produced 40,000 aircraft in a single year. The United States spent $4.5 billion trying to build bomber bases in China alone. Japan, near the end, was manufacturing 1,500 new planes a month while its pilots were dying faster than they could be trained.

  The questions that hung over all of this were not purely military. Could bombing alone win a war? Should fighters protect bombers, or hunt the enemy on their own? What happened to the men who flew mission after mission without rotation, in jungle bases where dysentery and heat were as deadly as enemy fire? And what exactly was the right target for the most destructive weapon ever conceived from the air?

• 2. The Air Forces Enter

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  Germany's Luftwaffe was, in the early years, the most combat-proven air force on earth. Under Hermann Göring, it had tested tactics in the Spanish Civil War, sharpened its techniques, and arrived at 1939 with real battle experience no other major air power could match. Its Stuka dive bombers terrified enemy infantry in 1939 and 1940, giving Berlin enormous confidence in its force.

  That confidence, however, masked serious structural problems. The Luftwaffe was never built to fight a long war. A 1933 decision by the German general staff determined that Germany lacked the labor, capital, and raw materials for large, four-engined long-range heavy bombers. The one general who argued otherwise, Walther Wever, died on the 3rd of June 1936, and his death killed his plans for a strategic bomber force literally with him. What remained was a force designed for battlefield support, not the kind of sustained industrial destruction the British and Americans were building toward.

  Britain's Royal Air Force, by contrast, had spent the 1930s expanding precisely for strategic bombing. From 42 squadrons and 800 aircraft in 1934, the RAF had grown to 157 squadrons and 3,700 aircraft by 1939. It also recruited aircrews from across the Commonwealth, training roughly 167,000 men in Canada and other nations, and integrated Polish and other airmen who had escaped occupied Europe.

  The United States moved more slowly. General Henry H. Arnold commanded the Army Air Forces, and he selected for combat commands men who were strikingly young by Army standards. His roster included Ira Eaker, born in 1896; Jimmy Doolittle, also born in 1896; Hoyt Vandenberg, born in 1899; and Curtis LeMay, the youngest, born in 1906. Purchasing agents under AAF control directed roughly 15% of the nation's Gross National Product. Even so, airmen were largely shut out of strategic planning committees, where seniority in a rank-conscious system belonged to infantrymen.

• 3. The Battle of Britain

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  Air supremacy was a prerequisite to Operation Sea Lion, the proposed German invasion of Britain, and the Luftwaffe's task was to destroy the RAF first. The force it brought to bear was formidable: 1,300 medium bombers guarded by 900 fighters, flying 1,500 sorties a day from bases in France, Belgium, and Norway. Against this the RAF fielded 650 fighters, with more coming out of factories every day.

  The Bf 109E, the Luftwaffe's primary single-seat fighter, carried a critical weakness. Its combat radius of 330 kilometres, driven by limited fuel capacity, gave it only about ten minutes of useful combat time over Britain before it had to turn back toward France. It could not adequately escort the bomber formations it was supposed to protect.

  What the RAF had instead was a system. Hugh Dowding, commander of RAF Fighter Command, had built an integrated network of radar stations, reporting centers, and operations control rooms. Known as the Dowding system, it was the first integrated air defence network in the world, and it let the RAF respond to German raids without flying constant defensive patrols, conserving its fighters for the moments they were most needed. The contrast with France, where no such system existed and Allied air forces had been comprehensively defeated just months earlier, was stark.

  The Germans initially focused their attacks on RAF airfields and radar stations, a strategy that, if sustained, might have worked. Then the RAF bombed Berlin, and Hitler ordered retaliation against London. Diverting attacks from airfields to civilians cost Germany the Battle of Britain. The RAF's fast Spitfires and Hurricanes could cut through the slow, cumbersome Stukas as they pulled out of dives, and the attrition on the Luftwaffe was unsustainable.

• 4. Winning the Air Over Europe

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  By 1943, the RAF's Bomber Command was flying deep into Germany at night, while American heavy bombers flew daylight raids. The losses on both sides were severe. During the latter part of 1943, the reorganized Luftwaffe night fighter system, using what were known as Wilde Sau tactics, inflicted increasingly heavy losses on the RAF. Sir Arthur Harris's attempts to destroy Berlin in the winter of 1943-44 produced serious doubts about whether Bomber Command was being used effectively.

  The decisive shift in Europe came from a change of fighter tactics in early 1944. Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, who took command of the US 8th Air Force in January 1944, released the growing force of P-51 Mustangs from their role as close bomber escorts. Instead of flying in tight formation around the bombers, the Mustang squadrons were tasked to fly 75-100 miles ahead, sweeping the skies over the Third Reich of Luftwaffe fighters. This change doomed in succession the twin-engined Zerstörer heavy fighters and then the heavily armed Focke-Wulf Fw 190A Sturmbock forces used as bomber destroyers. The Luftwaffe's fighter pilot force bled out through 1944.

  The Luftwaffe had invested in jet technology but could not deploy it in time. The Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter did not enter service until July 1944. The Heinkel He 162 appeared only during the last months of the war. Both the BMW 003 and Junkers Jumo 004 jet engines had required lengthy development times. By 1944, the Luftwaffe's fuel supply had run dry due to the Allied oil campaign, reducing it largely to anti-aircraft flak roles and forcing many of its men into infantry units. At its peak that year it operated 39,000 flak batteries staffed by a million people in uniform, men and women both.

  The one notable Luftwaffe success in strategic bombing was the destruction of an airbase at Poltava in Ukraine during Operation Frantic, which housed 43 new B-17 bombers and a million tons of aviation fuel.

• 5. The Pacific Turns at Midway

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  Japan entered the war with the finest naval aviators in the world, trained at the Misty Lagoon experimental air station, and it showed. In December 1941, Japanese naval air power sank the American battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor. In February 1942 came a major raid on Darwin, Australia. In April, a powerful Japanese carrier force drove the British fleet out of the Indian Ocean entirely, sinking the carrier HMS Hermes and two cruisers. By spring 1942, land-based airpower coordinated with ground forces had enabled Japan to overrun Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines.

  The Doolittle Raid, launched in April 1942 using 16 B-25 bombers taken off aircraft carriers, did little physical damage to Tokyo. Its effect was psychological and strategic. The raid caused an uproar in both the Japanese Army and Navy commands, who had lost face letting the Emperor be threatened. The Navy concluded it had to extend its eastern defense perimeter to Midway.

  At the Battle of the Coral Sea, fought between the 4th and the 8th of May 1942, the opposing fleets never saw one another directly. The Americans lost a fleet carrier and suffered greater tactical losses, but Japan cancelled a planned offensive. Crucially, damage to one Japanese fleet carrier and another carrier's air group kept both out of the coming battle at Midway.

  At Midway, Japan brought 272 warplanes operating from four carriers. The US Navy carriers had 233 aircraft, with another 115 AAF and Marine land-based aircraft on Midway itself. American cryptographic success had provided the dates and a complete order of battle for the Japanese operation. Two simultaneous, unplanned dive bomber attacks, arriving after roughly ninety minutes of constant harassment that had left the Japanese combat air patrol out of position, sank three Japanese carriers in the early hours of the battle. A fourth was sunk by the end of the day. Japan, having lost all four carriers, was forced to retreat. Without those carriers, Japan never again launched a major effective offensive in the Pacific.

• 6. Fire Over Japan

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  Japan's large cities, packed with wood-framed buildings, were acutely vulnerable to fire. One-sixth of the entire Empire's munitions were manufactured in Osaka alone. By 1944, the capture of the Marianas, particularly Saipan and Tinian, gave the Americans a close, secure base for the B-29 Superfortress, whose four Wright R-3350 supercharged engines of 2,200 horsepower each could carry four tons of bombs 3,500 miles at 33,000 feet.

  Early systematic raids beginning in June 1944 were unsatisfactory. General Arnold brought in Curtis LeMay to lead the campaign. In early 1945, LeMay ordered a radical tactical change: strip out the defensive machine guns and gunners, reduce altitude, and fly at night. The fuel saved by not climbing to 30,000 feet could be replaced with additional bombs. Japanese radar, fighter, and anti-aircraft systems proved inadequate to respond.

  The results were catastrophic for Japanese cities. On the night of the 9th and the 10th of March 1945, Operation Meetinghouse hit Tokyo, destroying nearly 270,000 buildings across a 16 square mile area and killing at least 83,000 people. On the 5th of June, 473 B-29s burned out 51,000 buildings across four miles of Kobe, with 11 B-29s lost and 176 damaged. Osaka was struck by 1,733 tons of incendiaries dropped by 247 B-29s, burning 8.1 square miles including 135,000 houses and killing 4,000 people.

  Japanese local officials noted that while damage to large factories was slight, roughly one-fourth of smaller factories that worked in conjunction with the big ones were completely destroyed by fire. Worker attendance fluctuated by as much as 50 percent due to rising fear of air attacks. The Japanese Army, not based in cities, remained capable of ferocious resistance, as Iwo Jima and Okinawa demonstrated.

• 7. Kamikazes and the Final Calculus

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  In late 1944, with conventional defense failing, Japan introduced a tactic of deliberate self-destruction: the Kamikaze. The name meant "divine wind," a reference to the hurricane that had sunk an invading Mongol fleet in 1274. Most of the aircraft used were converted obsolete fighters and dive-bombers, and many crashed during training or before reaching their targets.

  The pilots were inexperienced, having had minimal training, but were well-educated and intensely committed to the Emperor. Experienced pilots led missions because they could navigate, but they were not themselves Kamikazes and returned to base. The inexperienced pilots, guiding their aircraft like guided missiles all the way to the target, achieved a far higher proportion of hits than ordinary bombing attacks.

  At the Battle of Okinawa in spring 1945, the tactic proved devastating. Over three months, 4,000 kamikaze sorties sank 38 US ships and damaged 368 more, killing 4,900 sailors in the American 5th Fleet. Destroyers doing radar picket duty were hit disproportionately, because inexperienced pilots dived at the first American ship they spotted rather than waiting to find the larger carriers.

  Task Force 58 analyzed the Japanese technique in April 1945 and found the attacks were executed with radical changes in course and altitude, using cloud cover, decoy planes, and approaches from any altitude or on the water. The American response was to increase combat air patrols, station more radar picket ships, and attack Japanese airbases and fuel supplies at the source. Japan suspended the Kamikaze attacks in May 1945, hoarding planes and gasoline for a potential Allied invasion of the home islands.

  On the 26th of July 1945, President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek issued the Potsdam Declaration, warning Japan of "prompt and utter destruction" if it did not surrender. Japan's government responded with Mokusatsu: kill by silence. On the 6th of August, the uranium bomb known as Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. On the 9th of August, the plutonium bomb called Fat Man fell on Nagasaki. On the 15th of August, Emperor Hirohito announced surrender, citing a bomb whose power to do damage was "incalculable."